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Comment by m11a | Hacker News Reader

Although I agree with all the issues you raise, I think the confusing nature of the pricing is by design.

Stripe's fee model probably makes serious bank, because it's quite non-transparent and basically nothing is provided for free. Want even the slightest extra feature? +1% of your revenue (and repeat)

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It's worth noting that most customers with any volume will be on custom contracts that will either be cheaper, include more features, or both. At my previous workplace we had this with relatively modest revenue and would renegotiate every year or two.

Is there a process for getting an account manager with Stripe? I think it would be useful for other reasons but cheaper fees is certainly good too.

I'd do like that:

- Have a large enough transaction volume, say, above $100k / mo.

- Use the contact form.

Note that if your transaction volume is $100k/mo, and Stripe takes 3% of it, it's $3k/mo for them. Maybe a customer that's worth paying extra attention to, but of course by spending a minimal amount of time.

I suspect that if your transaction volume were, say, $1M/mo, they would have contacted you already.

There's a "Contact Sales" link right next to the sign-in button on stripe.com.

“Everyone gets cheaper pricing except anyone you know.”

Ah, the "we're out of ideas and have nothing, time to squeeze until the company dies, to chase stock price" phase of a business.

Like your cable company!

It's worked for 45+ years for cable companies.

Negotiating for medium and high volume sales isn’t exactly unheard of…

It’s kind of the rule rather than the exception in B2B. Hell, a lot of businesses will give you better terms just for opening a business account.

Yeah well, this article is called “I hate Stripe.” People hate Comcast too.

Stripe is also one of the most expensive payment services - enough so that I worked at a company where we had an in-house payments frontend for Asia which was basically a common integration over about 6 different major regional banks. The reason was pretty obvious: Stripe was something like a 2.5% surcharge, our system 0.2-0.5%. That was a huge difference in revenue.

How did you get the visa and mastercard interchange fees down so low? Just the interchange fees for non debit cards can be as high as 2.5% (premium travel cards for example), not even mentioning Stripe's fee then.

AFAIK it was basically just minimising Stripes cut so overall the cost may have been higher then that.

> Stripe's fee model probably makes serious bank, because it's quite non-transparent and basically nothing is provided for free.

Whatever it is making, it is apparently not enough to IPO. I would temper my expectations.

Stripe ['s leadership] doesn't want to IPO, and its balance sheet doesn't need to. There's ridiculous demand for a Stripe IPO, whether it could is not at all in question.

An IPO is, if anything, a bad thing for a company. I wouldn't consider it a black mark that they aren't selling stock publicly and subjecting themselves to the "must grow every quarter at all costs" insanity.

You can make plenty of money and still be private. Look at Steam.

I’d say it’s not enough to satisfy early investors, who probably want a 10~50x return before IPO. They could definitely go public if they wanted to, and do ‘well’.

Does Stripe need to IPO? Are they just privately held, or do they have VCs or others that need to be paid back?

They have raised at least $6.5 Billion.

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